


For The World Is Hollow And I Have Touched The Sky

by Leyenn



Category: X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-16
Updated: 2009-11-16
Packaged: 2017-10-03 02:24:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leyenn/pseuds/Leyenn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-registration, all the power in the world can't set them free.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For The World Is Hollow And I Have Touched The Sky

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Nyarth for the xmmficathon.

It's a new world, born in flames and raised by the great swell of water that swallowed her up, smothering one life to bring forth another.

She sleeps fitfully on a bed five miles wide, or it seems like. Luxurious silk under her skin, fluttering against the floor, crinkled by well-worn leather and singed at the edges. Around her wrist a strip of metal, burning, burning, burning. Blackened where it touches her and they don't see.

A gilded cage for a firebird, free in everything but words.

_She flew back to the School, all the way from Canada, and she didn't walk even to the front door. Why walk with wings of fire soaring in her mind? She was everything, felt everything, and nothing could stop her. Freedom spoke to her like whispers and she bathed in it, how easy it was to just be._

Logan wasn't there. The Professor wasn't surprised to see her; in her turn, she wasn't surprised by that. Embarrassed a little, but then his mind touched hers, and she knew: the student should always, one day, surpass the teacher. She smiled.

Scott cried, clung to her and shouted at her in turn, refused to let go from the instant he saw her standing there, alive. Even more than alive. Even more alive than he was. In the end she had to slip out of bed; stunned him with a half a look when he made to follow and went out into the night.

"It was never like this before, was it."

She opened her hands. A rainbow of flames leapt into shape: a soaring eagle, a leaping fish. Above her the sky rumbled a reply.

"It's all so easy now. Nothing like it was before."

"No." Storm stepped up to the balcony rail beside her, leaning out. "It burns, doesn't it. The kind of power you feel."

She closed her eyes. The eagle swelled around her heart, its wings bursting from her shoulders to light the night. "Yes."

"I don't think Scott's going to understand that, is he?"

Even her tears burned. "He's just afraid. He-"

"He suffered terribly when you- while you were gone." Storm turned to her, showing the whiteness of her eyes. Rain thundered where a clear sky had been, moments before, a spreading darkness on the light stone under her feet. "He and Logan, both."

"Only them?"

White eyes filled with tears. She saw her reflection in them, in the glistening rain, in the crack of lightning tracing down from heaven. "No, not... not only them."

"I'm sorry," she said, and she meant it so much more than she'd meant it to Scott or to the Professor. "I'm so sorry."

Storm smiled. "It's all right."

"Is it, really?" She felt for the power burning inside her, wanting out, dowsed only a little by the rain. It was there, bright, shining, heat and light and perfection, wonderful and fearsome. "I don't know-"

"I know." Storm turned to her fully and stepped closer, and she saw an angel reflected in those eyes. "Shh." Skin rich as chocolate on her lips, cool as the rainstorm drenching her face. "I understand."

Thunder roared like drums, and even her power felt almost dull against the flash of lightning all around as Ororo leaned close and kissed her.

There was no control that could ever hold with the rain pouring down, the sky brighter than morning and the stone under her bare feet hot with tropical rain, trickling electricity and the ecstasy of power. It flooded her, mind and skin, a wave never-ending that crashed over them both through that kiss; she folded arms and glorious wings around Ororo, a passionate and grateful embrace, and she never knew who it was lifting them into the air.

It was stunning and raw and loving and wondrous and things beyond words - beyond thought, beyond remembering how they were in midair and it was storming like nothing ever seen in Westchester in the middle of June. It was all the things she'd never understood about Storm's mind, violently beautiful and uncontrolled behind the mask of calm - and when Storm let go, threw back her head into the cushion of shining wings and screamed her release in lightning burnt across the clouds, and the rain thundered down - then it was all right, all of it, because oh, thank God, someone still knew _her. _

She woke up with dried rainwater on her skin, unchecked Phoenix-fire curling in tendrils that tickled and twisted around her fingers.

Scott didn't speak to her the next day.

The Professor warned her that, perhaps, such spectacle was not always called for? She smiled and promised what he wanted to hear, with at least a hope of keeping it. Lightning trickled over her skin as she walked out of his study. She went to the balcony and let the flames inside take her into the sky.

It was the fire that brought them, eventually, moths with guns to the Phoenix-flame. But she refuses to use it the way she should, the way they still believe she will, one day, some day. She is, connected to them all: they will never know, nor will they ever understand, she won't use this to kill. Even if it means a cage.

Magneto was too right about everything.

Storm curls up against her, steel cold against a slim wrist, skin that's still as rich as chocolate and soft like rain. Her presence is soothing, when the fires are burning too hot and she can feel it all - the hate, the anger, the pain, the degradation of it all. The segregation. The strangeness and stupidity of fear, how it means they have everything with the freedom to do nothing.

She didn't think it would be like this.

She doesn't know if this power inside will ever let her die, or if it has greater things to do before that happens. But some days she wishes for it all the same.

  


*

  



End file.
